Of all the manifold literary achievements of the Victorian age, the most important and enduring may very well turn out to be those traditionally regarded as mere entertainment, as "light" and popular works. While authors such as Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Dickens, and George Eliot occupy the center of the stage, and supporting players such as Rossetti, Swinburne, Meredith, and Butler wait eagerly in the wings, a numerous and ebullient crowd looks on from the cheap seats. Among that noisy and attractive group are such disparate figures as Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and, unquestionably, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Like his fellows, Conan Doyle has enjoyed great popularity and small critical success; like them, he toiled in fields distant from the capitals of high culture; like some of them, he espoused currently unfashionable views; like all of them, he sums up in his life, personality...